Writing Quotes - Page 114

When you're trying to create a career as a writer, a little delusional thinking goes a long way.

But our wounds are part of who we are...and there is nothing left to chance....And pain's the pen that writes the songs....That call us forth to dance

In fact, the influence of Schoenberg may be overwhelming on his followers, but the significance of his art is to be identified with influences of a more subtle kind - not the system, but the aesthetic, of his art. I am quite conscious of the fact that my Chansons madécasses are in no way Schoenbergian, but I do not know whether I ever should have been able to write them had Schoenberg never written.

There is no remedy so easy as books, which if they do not give cheerfulness, at least restore quiet to the most troubled mind.

I do not write often now - not for want of something to say, but from a loathing of all I see and hear. Why dwell upon it?

A painter paints, a musician plays, a writer writes - but a movie actor waits.

I think to the degree writers are serious, there is a greater tendency for them to write to themselves, because they're trying to compose their own thoughts. They are trying to find out what is in their minds, which is the great mystery. Finding out who you are, what is in your head, and what kind of companion you are to yourself in the course of life. I do think people have very profound lives of which they say virtually nothing.

We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail.

I didn't set out to write certain kinds of songs - I just set out to write good songs.

The rule is: the word 'it's' (with apostrophe) stands for 'it is' or 'it has'. If the word does not stand for 'it is' or 'it has' then what you require is 'its'. This is extremely easy to grasp. Getting your itses mixed up is the greatest solecism in the world of punctuation. No matter that you have a PhD and have read all of Henry James twice. If you still persist in writing, 'Good food at it's best', you deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave.

I will always really work hard to write as much as I can, but I also love sitting back and waiting on those big Nashville songwriters to send me some great songs, too.

One cannot choose what he writes - one can only choose to face it.

People wish to be poets more than they wish to write poetry, and that's a mistake. One should wish to celebrate more than one wishes to be celebrated.

The unsaid, for me, exerts great power.

The world is full of CEOs that think that just because they write a memo or they write a letter inside an annual report or they give a little video speech that gets sent around the company, they think that's what's really going to affect employees.

Writing down your trades is the best exercise in the world.

One ought only to write when one leaves a piece of one's own flesh in the inkpot, each time one dips one's pen.

Writing is a form of herding. I herd words into little paragraph-like clusters.

There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.

Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.

I don't consider myself to be a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend - give an extra dimension to - the medium of words. It happens very often my writing with a pen is interrupted with my writing with a brush - but I think of both as writing.

The greater part of critics are parasites, who, if nothing had been written, would find nothing to write.

Everywhere I find the signature, the autograph of God, and he will never deny his own handwriting. God has set his tabernacle in the dewdrop as surely as in the sun. No man can any more create the smallest flower than he could create the greatest world.

A writer needs loneliness, and he gets his share of it. He needs love, and he gets shared and also unshared love. He needs friendship. In fact, he needs the universe. To be a writer is, in a sense, to be a day-dreamer - to be living a kind of double life.

In our dreams (writes Coleridge) images represent the sensations we think they cause; we do not feel horror because we are threatened by a sphinx; we dream of a sphinx in order to explain the horror we feel.